Machine technicians and engineers may use schematics as a map to identify and navigate electronics and electromechanical systems for maintenance, diagnosis, and other operations. Some schematics may be delivered to the user in electronic form and viewed on a hand-held or other types of computing device such as a tablet, a desktop or laptop computer, or other interactive screen. While using the electronics schematic, the technician may manually trace a line of an electronic circuit to identify a connecting point of the line, to evaluate systems and sub-systems that may be affected by that line, and to identify a source and termination point for the line of interest. Tracing a line in a schematic can be time consuming and technically challenging when a circuit includes a dense layout of electronics components.
Some systems for interactive electronics schematic delivery may highlight a circuit when selected by the technician using the hand-held device. This can make navigation of dense circuits easier for technicians by tracing the line through the circuit when selected, and highlighting the line of interest by changing the color and/or luminance of the line. The electronics schematic is limited, however, to the extent to which the circuit is dissected and programmed on the front end by a programmer, to create the interactive schematic objects for use by the technician. For example, the schematic objects may be circuits or portions of circuits in the schematic that are selectable by the user to highlight or manipulate the circuit depiction in some way. Conventional systems may produce electronics schematic files with manual programming steps, where the schematic files are executable by the viewing device to present user-selectable circuits that perform in certain ways when selected by a technician. Because conventional generation of electronics schematics that provide electronic circuit navigation is labor intensive, and the generation of the electronics schematic requires manual programming steps, there may be limited electronics schematics files available for some machine and circuit designs.
An example system for electronic circuit navigation is U.S. Pat. No. 8,214,789 (referred to hereafter as “the '789 reference”). The '789 reference describes a system for navigating objects in an electronics schematic diagram. The navigable objects may be lines in a circuit that can be selected in response to a keyboard input from a technician. In the '789 reference, a selected object may change color when selected to highlight the selected object. The '789 reference does not, however, include a system for generating the electronics schematic, but instead likely relies on one or more programmers to generate the schematic with manual programming steps.
Example embodiments of the present disclosure are directed toward overcoming the deficiencies described above.